From Students to Solutions | On The Brink: Season 2, Episode 14Video: From Students to Solutions | On The Brink: Season 2, Episode 14
Ask Canada’s most decorated soybean breeder his favourite part of the job
and he doesn’t name a single variety. He names the students.
Istvan Rajcan is a professor of soybean breeding and genetics in the
Department of Plant Agriculture at the University of Guelph, where he has
run the soybean breeding program for 28 and a half years. In that time he
has developed 87 soybean cultivars, published 140 refereed papers and
trained 51 graduate students. In 2025 he received the Public Sector Impact
Award from the National Association for Plant Breeding.
He is also worried. In this episode he says Canada is at a crossroads,
pointing to recent government cuts to plant breeding programs and to the
facilities that support them. His prescription is structural. "Plant
breeding funding formula has to be a long-term one," he says.
The formula he is defending is the public-private matching arrangement his
program runs on. Private seed companies fund the work, provincial or
federal money matches it, and the combined pool stretches each dollar
further than either source could alone. At the National Association for
Plant Breeding annual meeting in June, he says American public breeders
were often surprised at how well that collaboration works in Canada.
He also describes how the people entering plant breeding have changed. His
early graduate students came mostly from farms. More recently they include,
in his words, "city kids who just became excited about genetics."
Topics covered:
Why public-private plant breeding funding in Canada needs a long-term
commitment rather than a larger one
How matching private seed company investment with provincial and federal
dollars multiplies research capacity
How the graduate student pipeline into plant breeding has shifted from
farm kids to city kids